Cowards

Squid. The quintet that’s been a relentless tempest of noise and ideas ever since they first kicked up their heels back in the back end of the last decade. Their second record, O Monolith, from 2023, was a heady concoction of whirling, angular rock, draped in the kind of progressive folk and jazz that had you dizzy just trying to follow it. But now? Now they’ve arrived at something a bit more considered. More measured, even, without losing that same sense of manic energy. It’s a record that catches the band at a curious crossroads, keen to simplify, to pull the reins in on the sprawling mess they’ve spent years crafting.

“Yeah, we wanted to strip it back a bit,” says Ollie Judge, the drummer and voice behind this swirling brew. "A bit of a springboard, really, to focus more on something closer to classic songwriting." A curious statement when you’ve been known to turn heads with a dizzying, serpentine take on what rock can do, but there you have it. And it’s Cowards, their third, that’s the result of all this taming. It’s a record that feels somehow inevitable. You get the sense that they’ve always been on this path, just waiting for the right moment to emerge from the chaos, where everything clicks into place.

It’s an album that makes you understand what the band were aiming for all along. By pruning back, they’ve found something more vital than before. Cowards flows like a river that cuts deeper the more it flows. Gone are the jagged, frantic edges of their previous work, replaced by something more hypnotic, more mesmerising. The rhythms lock into motorik grooves, steady and insistent. There’s a kind of grandeur here, too – strings that swell up with an almost cinematic sweep, and bursts of rock that feel propulsive, relentless. Even in the space between the notes, you can feel the pressure. This is less is more, but more in a way that’s only felt when you leave the room to breathe a little.

As guitarist Louis Borlase puts it, “It felt like we were just riding the wave. We didn’t have to stop and think too hard about how to let an idea come or go. It just... happened.” And isn’t that the trick, right? When things click like that, when the music is effortlessly alive, it can only mean one thing: Cowards is, by their own admission, the best they’ve made.